Music

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Writer-director-cinematographer-musician Quentin Dupieux
(did he also make lunch for the crew?) began his last film, Rubber, the uber-self-conscious tale of
a suddenly animate car tire that goes on a psychokinetic killing spree throughout
the desert of the American Southwest, with what amounted to his movie’s entire raison d’être, his cinematic mission
statement. The lead character directly
addresses the audience with a declaration that many of the events and
circumstances in some of the most popular narrative movies of all time—E.T.- the Extra-terrestrial and Love Story are name-checked, among
others—occur for no reason whatsoever.
(The italics are mine, but, hoo, boy, are they ever the director’s as well.)The movie is a none-too-deep-dish rumination on narrative logic and the role of
the audience in accepting, rejecting, and sometimes even abetting the most
illogical of narrative leaps, a jokey, nihilistically self-satisfied lark, albeit one with a healthy dollop of
visual flair, whose rib-nudging is insistent and incessant enough to cause bruising
for those who resist, as well as bouts of self-congratulation among the cognoscenti
who dig nothing more than a good flaunting of cinematic convention, who get what Dupieux is up to. I got it, all right, and I came away wishing Roger Corman
had directed it instead. If you haven’t guessed by now, I pretty much hated Rubber for its smug attitude toward not
only its own shallow purpose, but also for its sour contempt for its own audience.So
I had slim hope that Dupieux’s new movie,Wrong,would be anything more palatable to my obviously hemmed-in,
bourgeois sensibility. Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick), a nonplussed suburbanite
whose life, to Dupieux’s delight, is apparently composed of one off-kilter,
dreamlike non sequitur after another, dutifully rousts himself from sleep each
morning-- to an alarm clock that reads 7:60 rather than 8:00-- and plods off to
a job at a nondescript travel agency-- where it is constantly raining inside the office-- from which he has
already been fired three months before the movie begins. On the morning that
begins Wrong, he discovers that his
beloved dog, Paul, has gone missing, an event that sends Dolph into an
existential tizzy and sparks the movie’s spin cycle of deadpan surrealist
comedy. (It’s one of Dupieux’s better minor key jokes that his protagonist has
a name which sounds much more like a dog’s than the one belonging to the missing
mutt.)

But before he can get to that monsoon-besieged workplace, he
runs into his neighbor (and best friend?), who panics at the prospect of having
to admit that he was seen jogging, and who is leaving the neighborhood on some
sort of vision quest. Then Dolph becomes so transfixed by a menu flyer for the
Jesus Organic Pizza delivery service he finds in the mail that he calls the
number not to order a pie, but instead to engage the sweet-sounding waitress on
the other end of the line about his confusion over the meaning of the company’s
logo, a rabbit riding a chopper. This is an encounter that will cause the movie’s
wacky narrative to further splinter off into even wackier, unanticipated avenues of absurdity.

It’s also essentially the same mission statement that launches Rubber, but restated succinctly in terms
of an event within the movie, rather than a pretentious, deliberately jarring
assault on the Fourth Wall. When Dolph repeatedly questions the logic of that
cycle-riding bunny logo, the waitress doesn’t blow him off—like she would in real life, wink, wink—but instead takes
his concerns seriously, unruffled by the unusual urgency of her customer. With
this one scene Dupieux demonstrates an understanding of how irrational imagery and happenstance can coexist with and even enhance the basic structure of a narrative instead of
simply, and precociously, aiming to blow it up for the sake of the explosion.

This apparent dawning marks a significant advance from the
smart-ass disregard of Rubber and put
me in a much more receptive frame of mind for the rest of Dupieux’s antics, which
includes some chronological misbehavior on his part and much more deadpan
acceptance of the very, very strange—a guy who walks around repainting people’s
cars without their permission, to cite just one example-- as well repeated
encounters with a mysterious guru of canine behavior, Mr. Chang (William
Fichtner, brilliantly wielding a vaguely Indian but ultimately indefinable
accent), who benignly orchestrated Paul’s disappearance before losing, and
perhaps killing the dog himself. There's also a lumpy private dick hired by Mr. Chang to
find Paul who operates out of the back of a discount pharmacy and has lots of
technology devoted to documenting the emotional journey of dog feces. (If, at
this point, you even have to ask, Wrong
may not be your cup of Bunuel-infused, Lynch-laden joe.)

But it’s not just Dupieux’s anchoring of his mind-altering
silliness to something of a narrative spine that makes Wrong so much more right than his previous picture. His own sense
of visual wit seems much more firmly established here—he’s clearly got a sense
of how images and sequences should be put together, the mastery of which is of
primary importance before one goes about exploding one’s own mise-en-scène, to say nothing of a
hundred or so years of narrative tradition. Wrong
is gorgeously assembled, and even if it doesn’t ultimately add up to much
it’s enlivening to see the director not only playing with form but actually
showing some as well.

He’s on much more solid ground with the performances here too.
The actors in Rubber were treated
with almost as much disregard as the audience (and the audience’s on-screen
stand-ins, who were mocked for wanting to see a killer tire movie and then
killed for it), little more than pawns in their director’s puny vision. And
yes, the monotonal deadpan that marks the peripheral reaction of Wrong’s incidental players wears thin
quickly, as this sort of stylish approach usually does for me. (In the
mainstream, see the films of John Landis.) However, Wrong is buoyed precisely the degree of humanity, of interest in
warmth and personality and cockeyed rejection of the dutifully bleak that is displayed
by his actors-- Fichtner, to be sure, who delights in his character’s
enlightened mania—he openly rejects Volume 1 of his seminal self-help book My Life, My Dog, My Strength in favor of
the more fully realized Volume 2-- but also Alexis Dziena as Emma, the
starry-eyed pizza waitress who falls in love with Dolph on the phone and can’t
tell the difference when he is replaced by a gardener who resembles Dolph not a
whit.

But most especially good is Jack Plotnick, whose off-kilter
visage carries the movie, and the audience, giving us something to grab hold
of, a mixture of acceptance and perpetual confusion over the dizzying circumstances
of his daily life in search of Paul which plays deeply well and sympathetically
off of the blinkered, unruffled deadness of the rest of the world. Plotnick, a familiar
face from TV commercials and movies, as well as a stint on Reno 9-1-1, registers an amazing level of empathy for someone who
initially seems so sociopathically detached from reality— he somehow manages to
leaven both Dolph’s needs and his obvious depression with genuine concern for
the character, never encouraging the audience to respond to his situation with
cruel or callous laughter. And it helps that Plotnick has a natural
handsomeness that seems slightly exaggerated for artistic effect, as if his
features had been randomly stretched and rearranged by a prankish portrait
painter—he seems of this world, yet also clearly and primarily of Dupieux’s,
and he sports a spectacularly receding hairline, highlighted by a perpetually
disheveled pompadour that makes him look as though he’s always just crawled out
from beneath the covers, where he’d seen something really bad. It’s a do that would have made Jack Nance squirm with
envy.

In a recent interview, Dupieux, riffing on that same mission
statement that seemed so blunt and tired in Rubber
and then refined to better effect in Wrong,
made a case for his particular brand of purposeful nonsense:

Almost every movie makes too much sense.
That’s why we call them movies — they’re very different from life. And usually
in a movie, at the end, you feel satisfied because everything is in order, and
everything makes sense… But from my point of view real life doesn’t make sense.
Every day you experience stuff that is not necessarily perfectly scripted… When
you dream your unconscious makes connections with things that are not supposed
to be connected. I really do think it’s the same in real life, I think life
would be super-boring if everything was scripted.

In Rubber
Quentin Dupieux displayed a punk provocateur’s delight in reveling in how
little sense anything makes, especially when it comes to the tastes and
expectations of audiences, and it left a lingering odor not unlike burnt rubber
from tires pointlessly spinning, a bird flipped in the general direction of
Hollywood. The final image of that movie indicates that Dupieux, like his fellow,
significantly less talented comrade-in-arms Harmony Korine, would ultimately like
to assault the system from within. Wrong
finds him having gained a bit of perspective as to how his penchant for surreal
imagery can be married with narrative intent without having to introduce the
bitter tang of deliberate alienation, but it remains to be seen if he can make
good on the promise resurrected here from the ashes of Rubber’s burning trash heap. Life would indeed be super-boring if everything
was scripted, but a world where nothing makes sense creates its own brand of
tedium. In such a scenario, if everything, including the director’s own M.O., is
absurd, then eventually nothing is—the smart-aleck snake begins to eat its own
tail. If Rubber suggested that the
snake would soon consume itself, then Wrong
at least offers some amusement and good will in the moment, along with the encouraging
possibility that perhaps there will be other items on the obviously voracious Dupieux’s
menu soon.

****************************************

(Wrong plays in
Los Angeles at the Cinefamily through April 4, and tickets for all performances
are available here, including for tonight 6:00 performance, which will be
introduced by director Quentin Dupieux.)

Friday, March 22, 2013

And finally, part four of our investigation into the very special teacher's guide to Miss Jean Brodie's very own Best Of-- these are, of course, the answers she received for her Modestly Magnificient, Matriarchally Manipulative Springtime-for-Mussolini Movie Quiz. The staff here at SLIFR University thank her very much for her participation, but most of all we thank all of you who contributed answers to this class session. They were, as always, extremely amusing and enlightening to read, and also loads of fun to excerpt-- the unexpurgated submissions have been and will always be available to peruse in the comments section under the original quiz post. (And the SLIFR administration wishes to apologize to Peter Nellhaus, who chose to sit this quiz out, thereby missing the opportunity to have his typically erudite and entertaining answers highlighted here. We hadn't anticipated a full-on answer recap, Peter, but Miss Brodie insisted, having a full head of steam and ambition, not to mention an unexpected window of free time on her hands. In your honor we will strive to impose the same standard on our next scholarly host, but only if you take part!)

So here we go, one last look at what you had to say in response to Miss Brodie's stimulating, squirm-inducing inqury. We shall begin with a consideration of the cinematic ideal.

25)
Is there such a thing as a perfect movie?

I do hope not. (estienne64)

Intellectually,
no. Emotionally, sure there is. (Self-Styled
Siren)

Sure, but definitions vary. It usually implies
that the director (or whoever) got exactly what he/she wanted onscreen, and
what resulted is good in every regard. But cinema is much more volatile than
that. Unintended happenstances are part of the charm, and what may look like an
imperfection could enhance the movie, making it more perfect. The first example
that comes to mind is the story (which might not actually be true, but the
spirit speaks to my point) of the last shot in The Last Temptation of Christ, in which some camera problem causes
causes a white-out at exactly the moment Jesus dies.Anyway, as long as Casablanca exists, it’d be hard for me to say otherwise. (Scott Nye)

My head says ‘of
course not,’ but my other head says, ‘please point out the flaws in Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story, or Seven Samurai.’ Or The Maltese Falcon. Or etc. (Jeff
Gee)

I find that the best films are made better because of their
flaws. Extreme example: Can anyone follow what the fuck is going on inThe Big Sleep (1946)? And
yet... (Tony Dayoub)

There must be.
There's no other explanation for Sunrise.(Sean Axmaker)

I think so. I don’t know what I’d change in Grand Illusion, Ride the High Country
and probably half a dozen others. (Tom
Block)

As Geoffrey
Tenant said in the great Slings and
Arrows: “Nothing is more boring than perfection.” So, to answer the
question: Perhaps – but it wouldn’t be a fun thing to witness. (wwolfe)

Not often, but yes. I do grow weary of
critics proclaiming every movie they see from their favorite director as a
masterpiece. After a while the word starts losing its meaning. (Craig)

There are movies
that couldn't have been any better than they were. (Robert Fiore)

Perfection is
for math and science, not art. The flaws are often what makes a work of art
special. (Robert T. Daniel)

Well, people
aren’t perfect, and most movies are about people. It would probably have to be
about something entirely different. Robots, maybe. Like Wall-E. Except that had
humans in it in the second half, and it kind of spoiled a great beginning.
Animals are pretty perfect, though. Maybe Winged Migration -- birds being
birds. Except they got humans to write the music, and to narrate it. Drop the
score and the narration track and there you have a perfect movie! (Weigard)

If there is, I
haven't found it yet. The closest I think I've come to is the recently departed
Del Tenney'sThe Horror of
Party Beach (1964).No. Seriously.(W.B.
Kelso)

26) Favorite movie location you’ve most
recently had the occasion to actually visit

I drive through
half the location shots of The Avengers
and Alex Cross on my way to work
every damn day, and I cursed every cast and crew member of both for six damn
months because of it. (xterminal)

In NYC last couple of weeks, and conscious of
passing through shots from Dressed to
Kill, Death Wish, Panic in Needle Park, Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, and of
course King Kong! (Jeff Gee)

In an hour we
could walk from my house to the subway station where the gunfight happens in 48 Hrs., the cemetery where Madeleine
visits Carlotta’s grave, and the dentist’s office in Greed. My favorite location is also probably Vertigo-related: the mission at San Juan Batista, which looks
amazingly like it does in the movie. A buggy and papier-mâché horse are still
sitting in the barn. (Tom Block)

Dexter Lake Club, Animal House.(Katherine
Wilson)

Almost every
day, I walk or drive past the restaurant/bar where the interior for most of the
first half of Death Proof was shot. (Josh K.)

Last summer.
Ridgeway, Colo. Saw some of the sets and props for the original True Grit filmed there. (Larry Aydlette)

I
drank Aqua Velvas in the bar where Robert Downey drank them in ZODIAC. Sadly
the place later burned to the ground. (Matthew David Wilder)

I often find
myself walking past the northwest corner of Vermont and Franklin, as referenced
in Double Indemnity, but they didn’t
actually shoot that scene there. (Mr.
Peel)

The multiplane
camera at the Walt Disney Studios. (Robert
Fiore)

While in DC last
year on business, I made a side trip to the infamous townhome and steps used in
The Exorcist. I walked the steps from
bottom to top, which gave me quite a workout! (Robert T. Daniel)

A couple of years ago, I visited the Old
Tucson Studio, now transformed into a kind of old west / western movies &
TV theme park. And there walked the dry gulch where John Wayne made the
prisoner exchange for Dean Martin in Rio
Bravo.(Sean Axmaker)

27)Second favorite Delmer Daves film

Nothing
can compare to Dark Passage, one of those great noirs that really
deserves more attention. But Daves' gift for a tight frame and slow-building
terror was well-deployed in Destination Toyko, where he also gets a
tough, stripped-down performance out of Cary Grant. (Brian Doan)

3.10 to Yuma. (Favourite: Dark Passage. Not that brilliant a film, but I'm sucker for all
that subjective camera stuff at the start.) (estienne64)

He wrote An Affair to Remember, so Bogey/Bacall
vehicle Dark Passage.(Anne Thompson)

Cowboy, with 3:10 to Yuma
being number one, although the clips I’ve seen from The Red

House suggest a possible new fave on the horizon. (Jeff Gee)

Probably 3:10 to Yuma. (The Red House is #1). I’ll watch Jubal when the Criterion comes along. (Tom Block)

A Summer Place. (3:10
to Yuma is his best, although The Last
Wagon is a sentimental favorite because my cousin Stephanie Griffin has a
supporting role in it.) (wwolfe)

Rome Adventure (Katherine
Wilson)

So this is
Hollywood hack month? Dark Passage
after Dames, but no one on earth ever
called Dames a Delmer Daves film, did
they? (Robert Fiore)

I should know
his films better. Never did see The
Hanging Tree or The Badlanders. I
may have to go with Dark Passage on
this one, though my 25-year-old memory wants me to put Cowboy in this spot. (Sean
Axmaker)

Hey, I’ve actually seen two! Hollywood Canteen would come out second
to An Affair to Remember.(Weigard)

The Petrified Forest(Jamie
Lewis)

28) Name the
one DVD commentary you wish you could hear that, for whatever reason, doesn't
actually exist

Harpo Marx on Duck Soup (just honking). (David Cairns)

Orson Welles on Citizen Kane would be cool. I imagine he
would need to do at least 3 separate audio tracks in order to get in everything
he might want to say. It would probably create three new films, all very Citizen Kane-like. (Weigard)

I
think about this shit stupidly a lot: there exist no Spielberg or Lynch
commentaries, and I think that is a crime for posterity. (Matthew David
Wilder)

Chester Novell
Turner on Back Devil Doll from Hell.
Because that dude is DEAD. (Simon
Abrams)

David Lynch onDune,
not only to hear of all the production troubles he was up against, but also to
hear of the different potential sequels De Laurentiis was hoping for. (Tony Dayoub)

It may exist–the
movie has never been released on DVD outside Japan–but I would love to hear a
commentary track for Gaichu from
Akihiko Shiota, Eihi Shiina, and Aoi Miyazaki. (xterminal)

Hawks, Grant,
Hecht and Russell on His Girl Friday.(Larry Aydlette)

Given James
Ellroy’s commentary track on Andre de Toth’s Crime Wave, in which he speculates that Timothy Carey just might be
the man who murdered his mother, I’m going with James Ellroy on The World’s Greatest Sinner. (Jeff Gee)

Director Phil
Tucker on Robot Monster. I really,
really want to know what he thought he was making. (Sean Axmaker)

I’d love a full
blown commentary on Alan J. Pakula’s The
Parallax View. Still one of the best conspiracy films of the 1970s. (Jack Deth)

Orson
Welles, regaling us with anecdotes about Joseph Cotten on the commentary track
for Criterion's double-disc, full restoration of The Magnificent Ambersons.
If he also wants to throw in a chorus of "The Man Who Broke The Bank At
Monte Carlo," I will not complain. (Brian
Doan)

Preston Sturges
on anything. (Robert Fiore)

Jack Nance, Eraserhead.(Thom McGregor)

I’d like to
assemble a panel of the most hilarious grandparents (intentionally AND
unintentionally hilarious) of my high school friends and see what they’d make
of any Harmony Korine film. (Josh K.)

29) Gloria Grahame or Marie Windsor

G. L. O. R. I.
A. Gloooooooria! (Larry Aydlette)

Windsor. ‘Salem’s Lot cred FTW. (xterminal)

Very, very
hard choice. Very slight edge to Marie Windsor because she made every
low-budget film she was in so much better. (Marilyn
Ferdinand)

Crazy doesn't get
any better than Gloria Grahame. (Sean
Gilman)

Grahame. This is
McGraw/Ryan redux. Also, much as I like Windsor, Grahame’s particular brands of
sexuality, weirdness and wildness are right up my alley. (Tom Block)

Grahame. (This
and Q20 make me feel I'm putting the boot into that excellent film The Narrow Margin.) (estienne64)

Grahame, isn’t
it? She is something. (weepingsam)

Gloria Grahame.
Because duh, GLORIA GRAHAME! (Sean
Axmaker)

Marie Windsor.
Gloria Grahame always looked like she was in the first stages of anaphylaxis. (Jamie Lewis)

Gloria Grahame
was in better movies. Marie Windsor is just far enough off being a true glamour
girl that you can imagine you'd actually have a chance at her. The kind of girl
Elisha Cook, Jr. thinks he can have. (Robert
Fiore)

Tough call. But
I always get a special thrill from spotting MW in a bit part. (David Cairns)

Once again, have
a faint idea of what Grahame looks like, so she wins. (Thom McGregor)

Marie!
Get outta here with that Gloria Grahame nonsense! (Matthew David Wilder)

30) Name a filmmaker who never really lived
up to the potential suggested by their early acclaim or success

The easy
answer's Kevin Smith, but I'm going with Witchfinder
General director Michael Reeves, who quite literally didn't live up to his
potential due to his dying at age 25. (Patrick)

I really thought that Clark Johnson had a
major career in front of him. Only a couple of features to his name, and of
those the TV movie Boycott (2001) is
terrific and the theatrical feature S.W.A.T.
is awfully well directed for such an insubstantial film (the best stuff is
unscripted byplay between Sam Jackson and Colin Farrell). But he directed the
pilots and early episodes of both The
Shield and The Wire and was
integral to setting the style and sensibility of those shows. Since then, I
haven't seen him really extend himself. He's got a solid career directing
television, and he does it well, but he should be directing features or
developing shows himself. He just seems to be marking time on other people's
projects. (Sean Axmaker)

I’m starting to
worry about Paul Thomas Anderson. The guy’s a fucking master but I’m not sure
what all that technique is in service of. (Tom
Block)

I know he’s a
favorite “whipping boy” for questions like this, but Michael Cimino. The Deer Hunter is a brilliant,
explosively acted film-and his infamous follow up, Heaven’s Gate, truly is a pretentious mess that derailed his career
(and it’s still a mess, no matter what revisionist history has occurred
recently). (Robert T. Daniel)

What
about John Singleton? It feels remarkably dated now, but Boyz N The Hood
was a huge deal back in 1991-- it came out the summer before my freshman year
of college, and the impact on people my age, especially, was immense: it was
the crest of the so-called "Black Pack" renaissance that Spike Lee
had kicked into gear with She's Gotta Have It, and the future seemed
like an endless horizon of potentially great films. Singleton followed it up
with the flawed but interesting romantic drama Poetic Justice, and the heavy-handed
but skillful Higher Learning. And then...

And then what? He's continued working on projects both personal (Rosewood,
Baby Boy) and product-driven (Shaft, 2 Fast 2 Furious),
but none of them show the flash of personality that his debut film did. He's
only 44, so he has a lot of time to explore, but it's hard to imagine him ever
capturing that kind of excitement and insight again. (Brian Doan)

Stanley Kubrick (wwolfe)

David Gordon
Green is an obvious example; there might be better, but he is the obvious one. (weepingsam)

There
are so many, it hurts to think about. Read Pauline Kael's late, post-retirement
reminiscence of Peckinpah. It is one of my favorite essays, if you want to call
it that, about filmmaking. A superfan, Kael is remarkably
clear-eyed--terrifyingly so--about the man Peckinpah was. She described him as
"the most unfulfilled of all great directors," and though that label
might belong with Welles, she may be right. What's worse, a cult has grown
around his garbled, poorly thought out and/or mutilated films. (Matthew
David Wilder)

Catherine
Hardwicke. I liked Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown an awful lot, but boy,
ever since then... (Scott Nye)

What if Welles
had finished more movies, been more disciplined, worked within the system? (Anne Thompson)

Isn't
it a shame that Howard Hawks never managed to top Scarface? KIDDING. The
Siren points to her sidebar to reiterate that one good movie, for her, is
enough. But because she re-watched Force of Evil recently, the Siren
will name Abraham Polonsky as a filmmaker thwarted by the tenor of his times. (Self-Styled Siren)

31) Is there a movie-based disagreement serious
enough that it might cause you to reevaluate the basis of a romantic
relationship or a friendship?

Gosh, no. I’ll
take imperfect people over perfect movies any day. (Weigard)

If someone
seriously defended the idea that Bio-Dome was a funny movie. (Subjectivity is
one thing, but there ARE limits.) (Edward
Copeland)

Sure. I used to
have a girlfriend/eventual roommate who called almost everything I liked
“pretentious shit”, and that was only the seventh or eighth most serious
relationship problem we had. I’ve had other friends who, given the choice
between a good American film and a good foreign film, would reflexively pick
the American one every single time, and that drove me nuts. (Tom Block)

Not necessarily... but I have stopped reading certain film
critics when a pattern of contrarian-ism develops which they can't adequately
defend. At least Farber and Kael can back up their iconoclasm with some serious
and well-expressed thoughts. But simply trying to get attention is cause for me
to move on. (Tony Dayoub)

I
lived with a girl with whom I suspected I had some really grave differences. I
took out a CD and said, "If I die first, I want you to play this music at
my funeral." I played it: "Cockeye's Theme" from Once Upon a Time in America. It's a long
piece. She was lying on the couch. When it was over, she looked up at me and
said, "Kinda....cheesy, isn't it?" In that moment I knew the
relationship was over. (Matthew David Wilder)

In my twenties,
maybe, but not anymore. (Sean Axmaker)

None of the
usual arguments, like Pauline Kael dismissing anyone who does not loveMcCabe and Mrs. Miller. I
would have to rethink relationships with people who enjoyed or cheered on rape
scenes in movies. (Marilyn Ferdinand)

A total disregard of
Monty Python. (Jamie Lewis)

I have a friend who likes both Gangster Squad and Les
Miserables. Every day is a struggle to forgive. (Roderick Heath)

Anyone who
sincerely believes that Peter's Friends
has any redeeming features is unlikely to feature on my Christmas card list. (estienne64)

No, that would
mean you are an extremely shallow or self-absorbed person, probably both. (Larry Aydlette)

In college I
called my boyfriend Peter a "movie moron" for not having seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. He never let me
forget it. (Anne Thompson)

If someone wants
to say to me that they hate Lubitsch/Wilder/Hawks/You get the idea and they’re
coming at it from a serious, thoughtful place I’d like to think that I’d be
open to what they have to say. Maybe they would make me think about whatever
the film is in a way I’d never considered before. I’ve certainly heard
intelligent people say bad things about movies I love and they had a good
reason. But if it’s someone who thinks that these movies are boring or dumb or
old-fashioned or only good for watching on Mystery
Science Theater 3000 then, well, what would even be the point of continuing
a single conversation? Also, if someone told me they preferred digital
projection to 35mm, that might be a rough start. (Mr. Peel)

Whenever
she's asked this question, the Siren likes to point out that she married a man
who dislikes John Ford. Her dissent-tolerance is pretty well established. (Self-Styled Siren)

I think if
someone said, “I just don’t like black-and-white movies” – meaning, really, any
older movies – that would put a serious crimp in the relationship. (wwolfe)

I was going to say no, but
I remembered a former coworker who said her and her boyfriend only liked 3D
movies. I wouldn’t have lasted an hour with that woman. (Josh K.)

I am not sure I can think
of anything. I’m pretty forgiving. (weepingsam)

No, or it would have
already happened. (Thom McGregor)

********************************************

Extra credit to Bill Ryan for submitting 100% correct answers on his quiz:

11) Is there a movie you staunchly refuse to consider seeing? If so, why?

Make Way for Tomorrow, because I was in the video store years
ago, and I was talking to the guy who ran the place, and I said “So have you
seen anything good lately?” and he said “Make
Way for Tomorrow is really good,” and I said “Oh yeah? What is that,
sci-fi? Bunch of lasers and such?” He said “No, actually, it’s a pretty
heartbreaking story about this elderly couple who, because of various financial
and familial influences…” But I cut him off right there, because I thought I
could guess, and I said “And they travel into the future? And before the old
guy hits the button that goes BEEP BOOP BEEP and sends them into the time-hole,
he goes ‘Okay Gladys, here we go…make way for tomorrow!” But the guy goes, “No,
it’s not…” and I went “Do you see the old lady’s tits at all?” He’s like “What?
No. Who are – “ “Save me the chin music, Frances,” I go, “If there’s no tits
and no time explosions then fuck all y’all!” Then I stormed out. I was soooo
mad, you guys.

I Will Cart My Dick Around in a
Wheelbarrow Without Even Being Asked To

16) Eva Mendes or Raquel Welch?

Ha ha ha aw yeah dude

17) Favorite religious satire

Gator

18) Best Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block)

“I
think There Will Be Blood is
real good.” “Did you see it in Cannes?” “No.” “I did. It’s not the same movie
if you don’t know that Gilles Jacob is within at least a couple hundred yards
of the theater. It’s as if a certain magic has been lost.” “Why are you such a
fucking piece of shit?” And so on. I’m not going to type out the whole thing.

26) Favorite movie location you’ve most recently had the occasion to actually
visit

The planet Earth. That’s where they filmed most of Poop Movie.

27) Second favorite Delmer Daves film

Hawmps!

28) Name the one DVD commentary you wish you could hear that, for whatever
reason, doesn't actually exist

I’d like one for Playtimewhere Jacques Tati says things like
“And this was the first day of filming,” and Jean Badal says “No, this was day
three.” But Tati is insistent this was the first day of filming! Those two in a
room together, just magic.

29) Gloria Grahame or Marie Windsor?

Ha ha I get what you are going for with this one! Up top!

30) Name a filmmaker who never really lived up to the potential suggested by
their early acclaim or success

Srdjan Spasojevic

31)
Is there a movie-based disagreement serious enough that it might cause you to
reevaluate the basis of a romantic relationship or a friendship?

Don’t like Summer Rental? I
will no-fooling murder you with a shovel, dickface.****************************************UP NEXT: In the ultimate expression of A Hard Act to Follow, Dennis attempts 31 swings at his own answers to Miss Jean Brodie's Modestly Magnificient, Matriarchally Manipulative Springtime-For-Mussolini Movie Quiz!***************************************